But of course great teams build great companies and great startup leaders know that they must always be recruiting.

Yet most startup companies I’ve ever worked with or observed make one crucial mistake: They assume that their recruitment process for a candidate is over when that person accepts his or her offer. The truth is the process isn’t over until after the employee starts with the company, updates her LinkedIn profile and emails all her friends.

In fact, it’s worse than that. The moment your future head of sales, marketing, product or even junior developer says “yes” is the moment you’re most vulnerable of losing them. I’ve written about this before relating to any sales process – You’re Most Vulnerable After You’ve Won a Deal – and the same is true in recruiting.

Recruitment is war and the enemy (people competing for talent) won’t accept defeat easily. Don’t fight 90% of the war. You must win.

Here’s specifically what happens:

The employee gives you a verbal commitment, an email accept or in some cases even a signed offer letter

You high-five your team for all the hard work, the hard fought persuasion and the new superstar that will soon come help solve your problems

If they are as good as you think it is highly likely her existing employer will work hard to keep her. So the moment she notifies her boss is the moment that the other side is pursuing a full-court press while you are celebrating and getting back to work.

If the person knew she was going to leave her employer and was talking to multiple companies to be sure the next company was the right fit, the moment she notifies the other companies that she’s not accepting their offer they, too, will begin an assault of persuasion

So ironically at the moment it seems everything is all sunshine for you is the moment you’re completely vulnerable

So what to do?

1. Acknowledge that recruiting doesn’t stop until the employee has joined your company

2. The moment you get an “accept” you should have all of your key employees email, call or even grab lunch/drinks/coffee with the new recruit to welcome her to the team. Your goal is to create emotional bonds with the company and also to think twice about the perception that will be formed of her for accepting and then backing out (which in case you didn’t know is more common than it should be)

3. I like to create an even stronger emotional tie by making public announcements where possible. I’d want to secure permission from the employee to issue a press release. It’s a combination of the pride you take in this new recruit and it’s a way to lower the odds that they bail on you. Yes, you could get egg on your face if she still backs out afterwards but you’ve now massively lowered the risk she backs out. The candidate will look worse for backing out than you will. Obviously press releases only work if the employee isn’t junior. But it doesn’t really matter if the press wasn’t big enough for TechCrunch – it just matters that it’s in the public sphere and gets amplified through social channels.

4. I also like to give some evening homework to the new employees. To the extent she starts problem solving on your behalf and working as part of your team she will feel more commitment to you, more excitement about the new role and, again, a stronger emotional bond to not backing out.

5. Finally, if possible get your investors involved if it’s a reasonably senior position. Set up calls for VCs to welcome her to the team. The more people she has spoken with about joining the more emotional bond and the less likely of her backing out.

Summary

Recruiting is brutal. If you put in a Herculean effort to get employees and then lose them after you’ve crossed the finish line you will waste enormous energy. It’s a shame that you have to launch a welcoming committee to bear hug your incoming hire and to run an external communication plan because an acceptance should be final but reality is reality. Trust me – I’ve seen it happen time again.

Increasingly, this experience is common not just to middle managers, but also to top executives.

Our company, The Energy Project, works with organizations and their leaders to improve employee engagement and more sustainable performance. A little over a year ago, Luke Kissam, the chief executive of Albemarle, a multibillion-dollar chemical company, sought out one of us, Tony, as a coach to help him deal with the sense that his life was increasingly overwhelming. “I just felt that no matter what I was doing, I was always getting pulled somewhere else,” he explained. “It seemed like I was always cheating someone — my company, my family, myself. I couldn’t truly focus on anything.” Mr. Kissam is not alone. Srinivasan S. Pillay, a psychiatrist and an assistant clinical professor at Harvard Medical School who studies burnout, recently surveyed a random sample of 72 senior leaders and found that nearly all of them reported at least some signs of burnout and that all of them noted at least one cause of burnout at work.

More broadly, just 30 percent of employees in America feel engaged at work, according to a 2013 report by Gallup. Around the world, across 142 countries, the proportion of employees who feel engaged at work is just 13 percent. For most of us, in short, work is a depleting, dispiriting experience, and in some obvious ways, it’s getting worse.

Demand for our time is increasingly exceeding our capacity — draining us of the energy we need to bring our skill and talent fully to life.

Increased competitiveness and a leaner, post-recession work force add to the pressures. The rise of digital technology is perhaps the biggest influence, exposing us to an unprecedented flood of information and requests that we feel compelled to read and respond to at all hours of the day and night.

Curious to understand what most influences people’s engagement and productivity at work, we partnered with the Harvard Business Review last fall to conduct a survey of more than 12,000 mostly white-collar employees across a broad range of companies and industries. We also gave the survey to employees at two of The Energy Project’s clients — one a manufacturing company with 6,000 employees, the other a financial services company with 2,500 employees. The results were remarkably similar across all three populations.

Employees are vastly more satisfied and productive, it turns out, when four of their core needs are met: physical, through opportunities to regularly renew and recharge at work; emotional, by feeling valued and appreciated for their contributions; mental, when they have the opportunity to focus in an absorbed way on their most important tasks and define when and where they get their work done; and spiritual, by doing more of what they do best and enjoy most, and by feeling connected to a higher purpose at work.

THE more effectively leaders and organizations support employees in meeting these core needs, the more likely the employees are to experience engagement, loyalty, job satisfaction and positive energy at work, and the lower their perceived levels of stress. When employees have one need met, compared with none, all of their performance variables improve. The more needs met, the more positive the impact.

Engagement — variously defined as “involvement, commitment, passion, enthusiasm, focused effort and energy” — has now been widely correlated with higher corporate performance. In a 2012 meta-analysis of 263 research studies across 192 companies, Gallup found that companies in the top quartile for engaged employees, compared with the bottom quartile, had 22 percent higher profitability, 10 percent higher customer ratings, 28 percent less theft and 48 percent fewer safety incidents.

A 2012 global work force study of 32,000 employees by the consulting company Towers Watson found that the traditional definition of engagement — the willingness of employees to voluntarily expend extra effort — is no longer sufficient to fuel the highest levels of performance.

Willing, it turns out, does not guarantee able. Companies in the Towers Watson study with high engagement scores measured in the traditional way had an operating margin of 14 percent. By contrast, companies with the highest number of “sustainably engaged” employees had an operating margin of 27 percent, nearly three times those with the lowest traditional engagement scores.

Put simply, the way people feel at work profoundly influences how they perform. What our study revealed is just how much impact companies can have when they meet each of the four core needs of their employees.

Renewal: Employees who take a break every 90 minutes report a 30 percent higher level of focus than those who take no breaks or just one during the day. They also report a nearly 50 percent greater capacity to think creatively and a 46 percent higher level of health and well-being. The more hours people work beyond 40 — and the more continuously they work — the worse they feel, and the less engaged they become. By contrast, feeling encouraged by one’s supervisor to take breaks increases by nearly 100 percent people’s likelihood to stay with any given company, and also doubles their sense of health and well-being.

Value: Feeling cared for by one’s supervisor has a more significant impact on people’s sense of trust and safety than any other behavior by a leader. Employees who say they have more supportive supervisors are 1.3 times as likely to stay with the organization and are 67 percent more engaged.

Focus: Only 20 percent of respondents said they were able to focus on one task at a time at work, but those who could were 50 percent more engaged. Similarly, only one-third of respondents said they were able to effectively prioritize their tasks, but those who did were 1.6 times better able to focus on one thing at a time.

Purpose: Employees who derive meaning and significance from their work were more than three times as likely to stay with their organizations — the highest single impact of any variable in our survey. These employees also reported 1.7 times higher job satisfaction and they were 1.4 times more engaged at work.

We often ask senior leaders a simple question: If your employees feel more energized, valued, focused and purposeful, do they perform better? Not surprisingly, the answer is almost always “Yes.” Next we ask, “So how much do you invest in meeting those needs?” An uncomfortable silence typically ensues.

How to explain this odd disconnect? The most obvious answer is that systematically investing in employees, beyond paying them a salary, didn’t seem necessary until recently. So long as employees were able to meet work demands, employers were under no pressure to address their more complex needs. Increasingly, however, employers are recognizing that the relentless stress of increased demand — caused in large part by digital technology — simply must be addressed.

Still, the forces of habit and inertia remain powerful obstacles to better meeting employee needs. Several years ago, we did a pilot program with 150 accountants in the middle of their firm’s busy tax season.

Historically, employees work extremely long hours during these demanding periods, and are measured and evaluated based on how many hours they put in.

Recognizing the value of intermittent rest, we persuaded this firm to allow one group of accountants to work in a different way — alternating highly focused and uninterrupted 90-minute periods of work with 10-to- 15-minute breaks in between, and a full one-hour break in the late afternoon, when our tendency to fall into a slump is higher. Our pilot group of employees was also permitted to leave as soon as they had accomplished a designated amount of work.

With higher focus, these employees ended up getting more work done in less time, left work earlier in the evenings than the rest of their colleagues, and reported a much less stressful overall experience during the busy season. Their turnover rate was far lower than that of employees in the rest of the firm. Senior leaders were aware of the results, but the firm didn’t ultimately change any of its practices. “We just don’t know any other way to measure them, except by their hours,” one leader told us.

Recently, we got a call from the same firm. “Could you come back?” one of the partners asked. “Our people are still getting burned out during tax season.” Partly, the challenge for employers is trust. For example, our study found that employees have a deep desire for flexibility about where and when they work — and far higher engagement when they have more choice. But many employers remain fearful that their employees won’t accomplish their work without constant oversight — a belief that ironically feeds the distrust of their employees, and diminishes their engagement.

A truly human-centered organization puts its people first — even above customers — because it recognizes that they are the key to creating long-term value. Costco, for example, pays its average worker $20.89 an hour, Businessweek reported last year, about 65 percent more than Walmart, which owns its biggest competitor, Sam’s Club. Over time, Costco’s huge investment in employees — including offering benefits to part-time workers — has proved to be a distinct advantage.

Costco’s employees generate nearly twice the sales of Sam’s Club employees. Costco has about 5 percent turnover among employees who stay at least a year, and the overall rate is far lower than that of Walmart.

In turn, the reduced costs of recruiting and training new employees saves Costco several hundred million dollars a year. Between 2003 and 2013, Costco’s stock rose more than 200 percent, compared with about 50 percent for Walmart’s. What will prompt more companies to invest more in their employees? Pain is one powerful motivator. Often companies seek out our services when they’ve begun losing valued employees, or a C.E.O. recognizes his own exhaustion, or a young, rising executive suddenly drops dead of a heart attack — a story we’ve been told more than a half dozen times in just the past six months.

In a numbers-driven world, the most compelling argument for change is the growing evidence that meeting the needs of employees fuels their productivity, loyalty and performance. Our own experience is that more and more companies are taking up this challenge — most commonly addressing employees’ physical needs first, through wellness and wellbeing programs. Far less common is a broader shift in the corporate mindset from trying to get more out of employees to investing more in meeting their needs, so they’re both capable of and motivated to perform better and more sustainably.

THE simplest way for companies to take on this challenge is to begin with a basic question: “What would make our employees feel more energized, better taken care of, more focused and more inspired?” It costs nothing, for example, to mandate that meetings run no longer than 90 minutes, or to set boundaries around when people are expected to answer email and how quickly they’re expected to respond. Other basic steps we’ve seen client companies take is to create fitness facilities and nap rooms, and to provide healthy, high-quality food free, or at subsidized prices, as many Silicon Valley companies now do.

It also makes a big difference to explicitly reward leaders and managers who exhibit empathy, care and humility, and to hold them accountable for relying on anger or other demeaning emotions that may drive short-term results but also create a toxic climate of fear over time — with enormous costs. Also, as our study makes clear, employees are far more engaged when their work gives them an opportunity to make a positive difference in the world.

The energy of leaders is, for better or worse, contagious. When leaders explicitly encourage employees to work in more sustainable ways — and especially when they themselves model a sustainable way of working — their employees are 55 percent more engaged, 53 percent more focused, and more likely to stay at the company, our research with the Harvard Business Review found.

Mr. Kissam, the Albemarle chief executive Tony first met more than a year ago, has taken up the challenge for himself and his employees. He began by building breaks into his days — taking a walk around the block — and being more fully focused and present during time with his family. He now sets aside at least one morning on his calendar every week for reflection and thinking longer term. He has also made it a practice to send out handwritten notes of appreciation to people inside and outside the company.

Mr. Kissam has also championed a comprehensive rethinking of his organization’s practices around meetings, email, flexible work arrangements, conflict resolution and recognition. By the end of 2014 more than 1,000 of his leaders and managers will have gone through a program aimed at helping them more skillfully meet their own needs, and the needs of those they oversee.

“I can already see it’s working,” Mr. Kissam told us. “Our safety record has improved significantly this year, because our people are more focused.

We’re trusting them to do their jobs rather than telling them what to do, and then we’re appreciating them for their efforts. We’re also on the right path financially. A year from now it’s going to show up in our profitability.

I saw what happened when I invested more in myself, and now we’re seeing what happens when we invest in our employees.” Tony Schwartz is the chief executive of The Energy Project, a consulting firm. Christine Porath is an associate professor at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business and a consultant to The Energy Project.

A version of this op-ed appears in print on June 1, 2014, on page SR1 of the New York edition with the headline: Why You Hate Work.

A 1-standard-deviation increase in university teachers’ effectiveness in boosting student performance reduces the students’ evaluations of their professors’ teaching quality by about half of a standard deviation, on average — enough to significantly reduce the teachers’ percentile ranking at the university, says a team led by Michela Braga of Bocconi University in Italy. Students, especially the least able, appear to respond negatively in their evaluations to the extra effort that good teachers require of them, a finding that casts doubt on universities’ reliance on student evaluations to inform faculty-promotion decisions. The researchers also found that student evaluations improve when there is fog and as the weather gets warmer, and they deteriorate on rainy days.

A few years into the company’s life, founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin actually wondered whether Google needed any managers at all. In 2002 they experimented with a completely flat organization, eliminating engineering managers in an effort to break down barriers to rapid idea development and to replicate the collegial environment they’d enjoyed in graduate school. That experiment lasted only a few months: They relented when too many people went directly to Page with questions about expense reports, interpersonal conflicts, and other nitty-gritty issues. And as the company grew, the founders soon realized that managers contributed in many other, important ways—for instance, by communicating strategy, helping employees prioritize projects, facilitating collaboration, supporting career development, and ensuring that processes and systems aligned with company goals.

Google now has some layers but not as many as you might expect in an organization with more than 37,000 employees: just 5,000 managers, 1,000 directors, and 100 vice presidents. It’s not uncommon to find engineering managers with 30 direct reports. Flatt says that’s by design, to prevent micromanaging. “There is only so much you can meddle when you have 30 people on your team, so you have to focus on creating the best environment for engineers to make things happen,” he notes. Google gives its rank and file room to make decisions and innovate. Along with that freedom comes a greater respect for technical expertise, skillful problem solving, and good ideas than for titles and formal authority. Given the overall indifference to pecking order, anyone making a case for change at the company needs to provide compelling logic and rich supporting data. Seldom do employees accept top-down directives without question.

Google downplays hierarchy and emphasizes the power of the individual in its recruitment efforts, as well, to achieve the right cultural fit. Using a rigorous, data-driven hiring process, the company goes to great lengths to attract young, ambitious self-starters and original thinkers. It screens candidates’ résumés for markers that indicate potential to excel there—especially general cognitive ability. People who make that first cut are then carefully assessed for initiative, flexibility, collaborative spirit, evidence of being well-rounded, and other factors that make a candidate “Googley.”

So here’s the challenge Google faced: If your highly skilled, handpicked hires don’t value management, how can you run the place effectively? How do you turn doubters into believers, persuading them to spend time managing others? As it turns out, by applying the same analytical rigor and tools that you used to hire them in the first place—and that they set such store by in their own work. You use data to test your assumptions about management’s merits and then make your case.

To understand how Google set out to prove managers’ worth, let’s go back to 2006, when Page and Brin brought in Laszlo Bock to head up the human resources function—appropriately called people operations, or people ops. From the start, people ops managed performance reviews, which included annual 360-degree assessments. It also helped conduct and interpret the Googlegeist employee survey on career development goals, perks, benefits, and company culture. A year later, with that foundation in place, Bock hired Prasad Setty from Capital One to lead a people analytics group. He challenged Setty to approach HR with the same empirical discipline Google applied to its business operations.

Setty took him at his word, recruiting several PhDs with serious research chops. This new team was committed to leading organizational change. “I didn’t want our group to be simply a reporting house,” Setty recalls. “Organizations can get bogged down in all that data. Instead, I wanted us to be hypothesis-driven and help solve company problems and questions with data.”

People analytics then pulled together a small team to tackle issues relating to employee well-being and productivity. In early 2009 it presented its initial set of research questions to Setty. One question stood out, because it had come up again and again since the company’s founding: Do managers matter?

To find the answer, Google launched Project Oxygen, a multiyear research initiative. It has since grown into a comprehensive program that measures key management behaviors and cultivates them through communication and training. By November 2012, employees had widely adopted the program—and the company had shown statistically significant improvements in multiple areas of managerial effectiveness and performance.

Google is one of several companies that are applying analytics in new ways. Until recently, organizations used data-driven decision making mainly in product development, marketing, and pricing. But these days, Google, Procter & Gamble, Harrah’s, and others take that same approach in addressing human resources needs. (See “Competing on Talent Analytics,” by Thomas H. Davenport, Jeanne Harris, and Jeremy Shapiro, HBR October 2010.)

Unfortunately, scholars haven’t done enough to help these organizations understand and improve day-to-day management practice. Compared with leadership, managing remains understudied and undertaught—largely because it’s so difficult to describe, precisely and concretely, what managers actually do. We often say that they get things done through other people, yet we don’t usually spell out how in any detail. Project Oxygen, in contrast, was designed to offer granular, hands-on guidance. It didn’t just identify desirable management traits in the abstract; it pinpointed specific, measurable behaviors that brought those traits to life.

That’s why Google employees let go of their skepticism and got with the program. Project Oxygen mirrored their decision-making criteria, respected their need for rigorous analysis, and made it a priority to measure impact. Data-driven cultures, Google discovered, respond well to data-driven change.

Making the CaseProject Oxygen colead Neal Patel recalls, “We knew the team had to be careful. Google has high standards of proof, even for what, at other places, might be considered obvious truths. Simple correlations weren’t going to be enough. So we actually ended up trying to prove the opposite case—that managers don’t matter. Luckily, we failed.”

To begin, Patel and his team reviewed exit-interview data to see if employees cited management issues as a reason for leaving Google. Though they found some connections between turnover rates and low satisfaction with managers, those didn’t apply to the company more broadly, given the low turnover rates overall. Nor did the findings prove that managers caused attrition.

As a next step, Patel examined Googlegeist ratings and semiannual reviews, comparing managers on both satisfaction and performance. For both dimensions, he looked at the highest and lowest scorers (the top and bottom quartiles).

“At first,” he says, “the numbers were not encouraging. Even the low-scoring managers were doing pretty well. How could we find evidence that better management mattered when all managers seemed so similar?” The solution came from applying sophisticated multivariate statistical techniques, which showed that even “the smallest incremental increases in manager quality were quite powerful.”

For example, in 2008, the high-scoring managers saw less turnover on their teams than the others did—and retention was related more strongly to manager quality than to seniority, performance, tenure, or promotions. The data also showed a tight connection between managers’ quality and workers’ happiness: Employees with high-scoring bosses consistently reported greater satisfaction in multiple areas, including innovation, work-life balance, and career development.

In light of this research, the Project Oxygen team concluded that managers indeed mattered. But to act on that finding, Google first had to figure out what its best managers did. So the researchers followed up with double-blind qualitative interviews, asking the high- and low-scoring managers questions such as “How often do you have career development discussions with your direct reports?” and “What do you do to develop a vision for your team?” Managers from Google’s three major functions (engineering, global business, and general and administrative) participated; they came from all levels and geographies. The team also studied thousands of qualitative comments from Googlegeist surveys, performance reviews, and submissions for the company’s Great Manager Award. (Each year, Google selects about 20 managers for this distinction, on the basis of employees’ nominations.) It took several months to code and process all this information.

After much review, Oxygen identified eight behaviors shared by high-scoring managers. (See the sidebar “What Google’s Best Managers Do” for the complete list.) Even though the behaviors weren’t terribly surprising, Patel’s colead, Michelle Donovan, says, “we hoped that the list would resonate because it was based on Google data. The attributes were about us, by us, and for us.”

What Google’s Best Managers Do

By examining data from employee surveys and performance reviews, Google’s people analytics team identified eight key behaviors demonstrated by the company’s most effective managers.

A good manager:1. Is a good coach2. Empowers the team and does not micromanage (See the sidebar “How Google Defines One Key Behavior”)
3. Expresses interest in and concern for team members’ success and personal well-being
4. Is productive and results-oriented
5. Is a good communicator—listens and shares information
6. Helps with career development
7. Has a clear vision and strategy for the team
8. Has key technical skills that help him or her advise the team

The key behaviors primarily describe leaders of small and medium-sized groups and teams and are especially relevant to first- and second-level managers. They involve developing and motivating direct reports, as well as communicating strategy and eliminating roadblocks—all vital activities that people tend to overlook in the press of their day-to-day responsibilities.

Putting the Findings into PracticeThe list of behaviors has served three important functions at Google: giving employees a shared vocabulary for discussing management, offering them straightforward guidelines for improving it, and encapsulating the full range of management responsibilities. Though the list is simple and straightforward, it’s enriched by examples and descriptions of best practices—in survey participants’ own words. These details make the overarching principles, such as “empowers the team and does not micromanage,” more concrete and show managers different ways of enacting them. (See the exhibit “How Google Defines One Key Behavior.”)

How Google Defines One Key Behavior

Drawing on companywide survey responses, Google breaks down each essential management behavior into specific activities and best practices.

Best practice: Assign stretch assignments to empower the team to tackle big problems“My manager was able to see my potential and gave me opportunities that allowed me to shine and grow. For example, early on in my role, she asked me to pull together a cross-functional team to develop a goal-setting process. I was new to the role, so she figured it would be a great way for me to get to know the team and also to create accountability and transparency. Once it was developed, she sent me to one of our Europe offices—on my own!—to deliver the training to people managers there.”

The descriptions of the eight behaviors also allow considerable tailoring. They’re inclusive guidelines, not rigid formulas. That said, it was clear early on that managers would need help adopting the new standards, so people ops built assessments and a training program around the Oxygen findings.

To improve the odds of acceptance, the group customized the survey instrument, creating an upward feedback survey (UFS) for employees in administrative and global business functions and a tech managers survey (TMS) for the engineers. Both assessments asked employees to evaluate their managers (using a five-point scale) on a core set of activities—such as giving actionable feedback regularly and communicating team goals clearly—all of which related directly to the key management behaviors.

The first surveys went out in June 2010—deliberately out of sync with performance reviews, which took place in April and September. (Google had initially considered linking the scores with performance reviews but decided that would increase resistance to the Oxygen program because employees would view it as a top-down imposition of standards.) People ops emphasized confidentiality and issued frequent reminders that the surveys were strictly for self-improvement. “Project Oxygen was always meant to be a developmental tool, not a performance metric,” says Mary Kate Stimmler, an analyst in the department. “We realized that anonymous surveys are not always fair, and there is often a context behind low scores.”

Though the surveys weren’t mandatory, the vast majority of employees completed them. Soon afterward, managers received reports with numerical scores and individual comments—feedback they were urged to share with their teams. (See the exhibit “One Manager’s Feedback” for a representative sample.) The reports explicitly tied individuals’ scores to the eight behaviors, included links to more information about best practices, and suggested actions each manager could take to improve. Someone with, say, unfavorable scores in coaching might get a recommendation to take a class on how to deliver personalized, balanced feedback.

People ops designed the training to be hands-on and immediately useful. In “vision” classes, for example, participants practiced writing vision statements for their departments or teams and bringing the ideas to life with compelling stories. In 2011, Google added Start Right, a two-hour workshop for new managers, and Manager Flagship courses on popular topics such as managing change, which were offered in three two-day modules over six months. “We have a team of instructors,” says people-development manager Kathrin O’Sullivan, “and we are piloting online Google Hangout classes so managers from around the world can participate.”

Managers have expressed few concerns about signing up for the courses and going public with the changes they need to make. Eric Clayberg, for one, has found his training invaluable. A seasoned software-engineering manager and serial entrepreneur, Clayberg had led teams for 18 years before Google bought his latest start-up. But he feels he learned more about management in six months of Oxygen surveys and people ops courses than in the previous two decades. “For instance,” he says, “I was worried about the flat organizational structure at Google; I knew it would be hard to help people on my team get promoted. I learned in the classes about how to provide career development beyond promotions. I now spend a third to half my time looking for ways to help my team members grow.” And to his surprise, his reports have welcomed his advice. “Engineers hate being micromanaged on the technical side,” he observes, “but they love being closely managed on the career side.”

Improving Management at Google: An Audio Interview

Harvard Business School professor David Garvin interviews Google software-engineering manager Eric Clayberg, a winner of the company’s Great Manager Award. They discuss how Clayberg and others at Google have benefitted from Project Oxygen, an internal research initiative that has evolved into a comprehensive management-feedback and -training program.

To complement the training, the development team sets up panel discussions featuring high-scoring managers from each function. That way, employees get advice from colleagues they respect, not just from HR. People ops also sends new managers automated e-mail reminders with tips on how to succeed at Google, links to relevant Oxygen findings, and information about courses they haven’t taken.

And Google rewards the behaviors it’s working so hard to promote. The company has revamped its selection criteria for the Great Manager Award to reflect the eight Oxygen behaviors. Employees refer to the behaviors and cite specific examples when submitting nominations. Clayberg has received the award, and he believes it was largely because of the skills he acquired through his Oxygen training. The prize includes a weeklong trip to a destination such as Hawaii, where winners get to spend time with senior executives. Recipients go places in the company, too. “In the last round of promotions to vice president,” Laszlo Bock says, “10% of the directors promoted were winners of the Great Manager Award.”

Measuring ResultsThe people ops team has analyzed Oxygen’s impact by examining aggregate survey data and qualitative input from individuals. From 2010 through 2012, UFS and TMS median favorability scores rose from 83% to 88%. The lowest-scoring managers improved the most, particularly in the areas of coaching and career development. The improvements were consistent across functions, survey categories, management levels, spans of control, and geographic regions.

In an environment of top achievers, people take low scores seriously. Consider vice president Sebastien Marotte, who came to Google in 2011 from a senior sales role at Oracle. During his first six months at Google, Marotte focused on meeting his sales numbers (and did so successfully) while managing a global team of 150 people. Then he received his first UFS scores, which came as a shock. “I asked myself, ‘Am I right for this company? Should I go back to Oracle?’ There seemed to be a disconnect,” he says, “because my manager had rated me favorably in my first performance review, yet my UFS scores were terrible.” Then, with help from a people ops colleague, Marotte took a step back and thought about what changes he could make. He recalls, “We went through all the comments and came up with a plan. I fixed how I communicated with my team and provided more visibility on our long-term strategy. Within two survey cycles, I raised my favorability ratings from 46% to 86%. It’s been tough but very rewarding. I came here as a senior sales guy, but now I feel like a general manager.”

Overall, other managers took the feedback as constructively as Marotte did—and were especially grateful for its specificity. Here’s what Stephanie Davis, director of large-company sales and another winner of the Great Manager Award, says she learned from her first feedback report: “I was surprised that one person on my team didn’t think I had regularly scheduled one-on-one meetings. I saw this person every day, but the survey helped me realize that just seeing this person was different from having regularly scheduled individual meetings. My team also wanted me to spend more time sharing my vision. Personally, I have always been inspired by Eric [Schmidt], Larry, and Sergey; I thought my team was also getting a sense of the company’s vision from them. But this survey gave my team the opportunity to explain that they wanted me to interpret the higher-level vision for them. So I started listening to the company’s earnings call with a different ear. I didn’t just come back to my team with what was said; I also shared what it meant for them.”

Chris Loux, head of global enterprise renewals, remembers feeling frustrated with his low UFS scores. “I had received a performance review indicating that I was exceeding expectations,” he says, “yet one of my direct reports said on the UFS that he would not recommend me as a manager. That struck me, because people don’t quit companies—they quit managers.” At the same time, Loux struggled with the question of just how much to push the lower performers on his team. “It’s hard to give negative feedback to a type-A person who has never received bad feedback in his or her life,” he explains. “If someone gets 95% favorable on the UFS, I wonder if that manager is avoiding problems by not having tough conversations with reports on how they can get better.”

Loux isn’t the only Google executive to speculate about the connection between employees’ performance reviews and their managers’ feedback scores. That question came up multiple times during Oxygen’s rollout. To address it, the people analytics group fell back on a time-tested technique—going back to the data and conducting a formal analysis to determine whether a manager who gave someone a negative performance review would then receive a low feedback rating from that employee. After looking at two quarters’ worth of survey data from 2011, the group found that changes in employee performance ratings (both upward and downward) accounted for less than 1% of variability in corresponding manager ratings across all functions at Google.

“Managing to the test” doesn’t appear to be a big risk, either. Because the eight behaviors are rooted in action, it’s difficult for managers to fake them in pursuit of higher ratings. In the surveys, employees don’t assess their managers’ motivations, values, or beliefs; rather, they evaluate the extent to which their managers demonstrate each behavior. Either the manager has acted in the ways recommended—consistently and credibly—or she has not. There is very little room for grandstanding or dissembling.

“We are not trying to change the nature of people who work at Google,” says Bock. “That would be presumptuous and dangerous. Instead, we are saying, ‘Here are a few things that will lead you to be perceived as a better manager.’ Our managers may not completely believe in the suggestions, but after they act on them and get better UFS and TMS scores, they may eventually internalize the behavior.”

Project Oxygen does have its limits. A commitment to managerial excellence can be hard to maintain over the long haul. One threat to sustainability is “evaluation overload.” The UFS and the TMS depend on employees’ goodwill. Googlers voluntarily respond on a semiannual basis, but they’re asked to complete many other surveys as well. What if they decide that they’re tired of filling out surveys? Will response rates bottom out? Sustainability also depends on the continued effectiveness of managers who excel at the eight behaviors, as well as those behaviors’ relevance to senior executive positions. A disproportionate number of recently promoted vice presidents had won the Great Manager Award, a reflection of how well they’d followed Oxygen’s guidelines. But what if other behaviors—those associated with leadership skills—matter more in senior positions?

Further, while survey scores gauge employees’ satisfaction and perceptions of the work environment, it’s unclear exactly what impact those intangibles have on such bottom-line measures as sales, productivity, and profitability. (Even for Google’s high-powered statisticians, those causal relationships are difficult to establish.) And if the eight behaviors do actually benefit organizational performance, they still might not give Google a lasting edge. Companies with similar competitive profiles—high-tech firms, for example, that are equally data-driven—can mimic Google’s approach, since the eight behaviors aren’t proprietary.

Still, Project Oxygen has accomplished what it set out to do: It not only convinced its skeptical audience of Googlers that managers mattered but also identified, described, and institutionalized their most essential behaviors. Oxygen applied the concept of data-driven continuous improvement directly—and successfully—to the soft skills of management. Widespread adoption has had a significant impact on how employees perceive life at Google—particularly on how they rate the degree of collaboration, the transparency of performance evaluations, and their groups’ commitment to innovation and risk taking.

At a company like Google, where the staff consists almost entirely of “A” players, managers have a complex, demanding role to play. They must go beyond overseeing the day-to-day work and support their employees’ personal needs, development, and career planning. That means providing smart, steady feedback to guide people to greater levels of achievement—but intervening judiciously and with a light touch, since high-performing knowledge workers place a premium on autonomy. It’s a delicate balancing act to keep employees happy and motivated through enthusiastic cheerleading while helping them grow through stretch assignments and carefully modulated feedback. When the process works well, it can yield extraordinary results.That’s why Prasad Setty wants to keep building on Oxygen’s findings about effective management practice. “We will have to start thinking about what else drives people to go from good to great,” he says. His team has begun analyzing managers’ assessment scores by personality type, looking for patterns. “With Project Oxygen, we didn’t have these endogenous variables available to us,” he adds. “Now we can start to tease them out, using more of an ethnographic approach. It’s really about observations—staying with people and studying their interactions. We’re not going to have the capacity to follow tons of people, but what we’ll lose in terms of numbers, we’ll gain in a deeper understanding of what managers and their teams experience.”

That, in a nutshell, is the principle at the heart of Google’s approach: deploying disciplined data collection and rigorous analysis—the tools of science—to uncover deeper insights into the art and craft of management.

David A. Garvin is the C. Roland Christensen Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. This article draws on material in the HBS case study “Google’s Project Oxygen: Do Managers Matter?” (case number 9-313-110, published April 2013).